


Will I Ever Roam?

by Talullah



Category: Wind Will Rove
Genre: Collection: Purimgifts Day 2, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-01
Updated: 2020-03-01
Packaged: 2021-02-28 01:00:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,867
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22975168
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Talullah/pseuds/Talullah
Summary: Teyla works her despair through music.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 2
Collections: Purimgifts 2020





	Will I Ever Roam?

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Zdenka](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zdenka/gifts).



Great granddaughter of Windy Green and granddaughter of Rosie Clay, Teyla knew she had the genes for music or music in her blood, as the old people would say, if not the sheer determination needed to practice everyday, until a song could flow perfectly out of her. She loved picking up a new song, learning the notes, the rhythm, practicing a few times and then it was time for the next one. Practice until you knew the song by heart, not for her. Practice and research until you knew all the variants ever invented - also not for her. But, then again, she was twelve and grandmother Rosie always said that patience was a learned skill. 

In her heart, she wanted to be a musician, not a teacher, not a medic, not an engineer or a pilot - just a musician. But the thought of committing so many hours to one activity… She also wanted to play in the low gravity chamber, to sew clothes for her dolls, after the old fashions she saw in the photos of the database whenever Grandma Rosie had the time to sit with her.

Which was often, nowadays. Grandmother Rosie had recently retired, although she still played in the OldTime for hours without end. Teyla had started going when she was eight. She would just sit and watch for a few hours, until Natalie, her mother, would come to pick her up. Jonah was not interested in music, thought, but loved history, or at least, his versions of it. Teyla always found it amusing, then boring when Jonah would come up to Grandma Rosie with a theory for an alternative explanation of some historic event and they would go on and on discussing it until Teyla found herself drifting to those other places they talked about, trying to imagine the thudding of horse hooves on the steppe and the harsh, cold wind on her cheeks. The terror of being persecuted in the night and having to pray hidden. The quietness of an idle evening under the flowering cherry tree, just before the samurais came in and burned everything to the ground. And the smells and sounds that came with it all.

She yearned for those unlived worlds. Would she ever feel anything that was not simulated or projected or recreated? Would her feet ever touch living grass - not the small patches in the biology rooms, but the real thing, with myriads of insects, hidden roots ready to be tripped on, the calls of real birds, the sound of wings flapping suddenly if you came too close?

Teyla heard the news every evening with her parents - it was just a small 15 minute segment of daily affairs, normally very boring. News diffusion through the social networks had long been prohibited, in light of the disastrous events that permeated the first half of the XXI century caused by the manipulation of public opinion. Her Grandmother was right, when she talked about the risk of history repeating itself, but sometimes Teyla thought it was inevitable.

Lately, that Nelson Rogers, a former student of her grandmother, had been quite prominent in the news. For years there had been problems with the database - small glitches, nothing missing, really, just trouble accessing random items. But then a major breach had happened, with thousands of records deleted from the main database, and everyone had panicked. Fortunately, the backups were intact, but Nelson, the culprit was so good, that he was only found out through the denouncement from a friend. Now, he proclaimed innocence on the cameras and before court. Whenever the news would start, Teyla tried to shut them off of her mind and concentrate instead on her Grandmother’s favourite song, Wind Will Rove. She could hear it clearly on her mind, each note ringing perfectly, each variation flawlessly enmeshing itself in the original melody. Her Grandmother had made quite a few variations with the melody, but Teyla preferred to play with the rhythm.

It was on one of these evenings that Natalie left Jonah alone with Dad, watching the news, and came to sit with Teyla.

“I heard what you were playing yesterday, at Grandma’s,” she said.

Teyla looked up at her mother. “Yeah… sometimes I improvise like that,” she said, half defiantly, half seeking approval.

“I think it was pretty good - very original. What were you thinking about when you were playing?”

“I don’t know.”

“Come on,” Natalie said smiling. “Is it private?”

“No. Yes. I mean…” Teyla trailed off.

“You know I used to play in a band when I was a little older than you. We did crazy stuff.”

“I know - Grandma told me. She said you were amazing.” Tayla immediately covered her mouth.

“Ah! A secret has escaped!” Natalie said laughing, while catching with her hand an invisible flying thing in the air. “Here, take it back.”

“I’m sorry,” Teyla said, her eyes unsmiling.

“Don’t worry. I know that Grandma came to see me play, at least once. I saw her, trying to hide behind a column.”

“Then why did you never talk with her about it? And why did you quit playing music?”

Natalie sighed. “Those years were kind of hard… I needed to rebel against all the traditions and all the rules and I really liked that crowd and the crazy things we did. But deep down, I thought I’d never be as amazing as the famous Windy Green or the less famous, in my opinion, quite unjustly, Rosie Clay. It was all rather narcissistic and age-appropriate.”

Teyla nodded. “I guess it is what you mean when you roll your eyes and say ‘Adolescence’ to me and Jonah.” 

Natalie laughed.

“But Mom, don’t you ever feel like playing again?”

“I’m too rusty.”

“Play with me, just once.”

Natalie acquiesced. She still had her fiddle, a replica, of course, nothing as special as her mother’s violin. It was tucked away at the end of a closet, and, whenever she did a deep cleaning she thought she ought to give it away to someone else. She found it and quickly tuned it without difficulty, while Teyla jumped up and down around her, proposing an impressive list of tunes, of which Natalie could only remember a handful.

“Okay, okay,” she said laughing, as she finished the tuning and gingerly put the bow to the strings for the first time in over ten years. “How about Grandma’s favorite, ‘Wind Will Rove’?”

“Or her crazy version, ‘Wind Will Roam’”, Teyla suggested.

“I don’t know,” Natalie said. “Let’s just play.”

And they played. Natalie, at first, with many mistakes, then better and better, Teyla with her brazen disregard for perfectionism, both laughing whenever they made a mistake. Jonah dropped his game and came to watch. Dad too, before he quietly went into the kitchen to program dinner and set the table.

They played again, after dinner, and in the next day, after school, sometimes nonsensical things, sometimes the music as it had meant to be played. They didn’t care for anything, but to have fun together.

Then the news came. Nelson Rogers was indeed innocent, or at least guilty of nothing that was serious enough, but there were others, a network of dissenting people, with plans to change the order of things within the ship. Teyla was terrified, and lost all joy. She was afraid that someone would hurt her parents or Grandma Rosie. She was afraid that someone would brainwash Jonah and turn him into an information thug. She was afraid there would be no knowledge left on the database for her to explore and learn all the things she wanted to learn. And mostly, she was afraid that the vandals, as Rosie called them, were so stupid that they would delete the parts of the software that kept the ship running and kept them all alive. 

And she wanted to live. As stupid as it might sound to others, she believed. She believed that their ancestors had made the right decision in escaping Earth. But mostly, she believed that, within her lifetime, they would find a planet. They would all find a place to settle, a place where they could work hard, where they could taste the sea as they dove from up above into the cool water, where they could gallop through an infinite plain, wind in hair, sun in eyes. She wanted dirt in her fingernails, not the soft much in Liat’s greenhouse, real dirt with real bugs.

It was during this time that she retreated into her room. After school, she would quickly do her homework and then spend hours and hours looking into the database, trying to absorb all that she could learn for her future life, filling up her DPG with things that her mother and teachers told her she would never need. She wished she could have a notebook, paper to write in with her own hand, as in the old days, but that was not possible in the ship. And there was no time to play with Natalie, Rosie, or with herself.

At the same time, even when she was immersed in studying, even when she was dreaming, there was this song, sad and happy, soft and slow, almost like ‘Wind Will Rove’, in some ways, but all of her own, running through her thoughts, playing in the back of her mind.

It was almost a year later, in the morning after the last trial, when everyone in the ship sighed of relief and talked about how close the network of dissidents had come to delete their recovered world, that she finally attempted playing it.

Grandma Rosie had picked her up from school and was in the kitchen with Jonah and Liat, attempting to bake something with their own hands, not by programming. Gingerly, she picked up Grandma Rosie’s fiddle, the wood one, that had belonged to her formidable great grandmother, Windy Green, and she started playing very low. Her bow technique had not improved in the absence of practice, and her fingers were not quite doing what she wanted them too, but she persevered. The tune started coming out better and better and she started playing more confidently. She stood up and lightly swayed as she played, her eyes closed, all the images of the future she knew she would have passing before her eyes.

When she stopped, she realized there were no noises coming from the kitchen. She turned and saw Jonah staring at her open-mouthed, Liat with her hands placed on Grandma’s shoulders, rubbing up and down, and Grandma Rosie whipping a tear from her eyes.

“That was beautiful, darling.”

Teyla tried to open her mouth to say it was clumsy and not yet quite the song she wanted it to be, but she had never seen Grandma Rosie crying. She felt like crying too.

“When did you write it?” Rosie asked, moving forward to her.

“It wrote itself.”

Grandma Rosie held her in a tight embrace.

“It was beautiful,” she repeated. “What do you call it?”

Teyla stepped back and thought for a moment. When the words left her mouth, she understood that she had always known the title.

“Will I Ever Roam.”

Finis  
March 2020


End file.
